Delft-based Orange Quantum Systems, a quantum technology startup, announced on Tuesday that it has secured €1.5M in a pre-seed round of funding co-led by QDNL Participations and Cottonwood Technology Fund.
Orange QS will use the new funds to develop its next generation of quantum chip test equipment. It will be the first turnkey solution optimised for high-speed qubit testing, targeting the emerging quantum industry market.
Talking about scaling the product portfolio to Silicon Canals, Garrelt Alberts, Managing Director at Orange QS, says, “Orange QS has been developing tools for the R&D market. With this first investment round, we can add products for the emerging quantum industry for quantum chip development and production at scale (more quantum chips and more high-quality qubits per chip).”
“The first product line will be full systems optimised for price, throughput, and ease-of-use, with a cryogenic environment, including cabling, filtering, and amplification, integrated with room temperature control electronics and our physics-based test protocol libraries,” adds Alberts.
The new funding follows a recent EIC Accelerator grant funding win this summer.
What does Orange Quantum Systems solve?
As quantum chip development moves from the lab into industrial fabrication facilities (‘fabs’), the ability to test quantum chips becomes even more of a bottleneck than it is today.
Currently, testing a small quantum chip requires weeks, using a cryogenic lab facility and a team of dedicated quantum engineers.
Testing in an industrial setting only makes the requirements of the cryogenic test environment more stringent, while at the same time demanding much shorter test times per chip.
“Testing quantum chips is an expensive, slow, and difficult process because it relies on a high-tech lab environment, manual workflows, and PhD-level operators. If the quantum computing value chain wants to increase the number of high-quality qubits per quantum chip, it will need industry-level foundry processes combined with fast test equipment,” explains Dr. ir. Adriaan Rol, Director of Research & Development at Orange QS.
Orange Quantum Systems: Making faster chipset testing easy
Founded in 2020 as a spinout from TNO (the Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research), Orange QS creates quantum chip test equipment to provide an easy, fast, and affordable alternative to in-house testing solutions for its industry customers.
This approach is well-known in the semiconductor industry, where companies focus on building test equipment.
Explaining it, Alberts shares,” Orange QS helps quantum chip developers to transition from an academic lab environment to a professional fabrication environment (‘from lab to fab’). The adoption of processes, production facilities, and best practices from the existing semicon industry could be the only way to develop quantum chips with much more and much better qubits, which is the core component of future useful quantum computers.”
Orange QS is currently the only company that focuses on the niche of quantum chip testing, with equipment that offers an environment where the relevant information processing properties of qubit can be measured.
“One of these best practices is to have dedicated test equipment that is used to test improvements in the ‘process of record’ through many short cycles of design, development, production, and testing. At the moment, the test equipment required in these device development cycles is custom-made in-house by quantum chip developers, because it has not been available as an off-the-shelf product. This situation keeps testing prohibitively expensive, slow, and difficult to execute. Orange QS solves this key bottleneck for the emerging quantum chip industry, Alberts tells Silicon Canals.
The company also says that it is the only company in Europe that has a roadmap to do this with high throughput as its core business.
Quantum Diagnostics Libraries
Earlier this year in Las Vegas, Orange QS launched the Orange Rack for the US quantum chip R&D market – a complete room temperature equipment stack that guarantees automation of quantum chip testing.
This automation uses the Quantum Diagnostics Libraries, a suite of proprietary software libraries for automated qubit testing that can also be licensed separately from the Orange Rack.
Elaborating on it, Alberts says, “The Quantum Diagnostics Libraries accelerate the R&D into quantum chips. It has libraries with most of the standard test protocols you need to test the quality of the qubits and performance of the QPU (quantum processing unit), implemented as standardised software protocols. These protocols allow for the automation of the experiments that need to be executed over and over again in a very specific order, with professional software development, data storage, and end-to-end data analytics in mind.”
Throwing light on developing the next-gen equipment, he says, “Our new line of products, enabled by the current investment and EIC Accelerator grant, will be fully integrated systems, optimised for price, throughput, and ease-of-use. They will have a cryogenic environment, including cabling, filtering, and amplification, integrated with room temperature control electronics and our physics-based test protocol libraries.”
Orange QS has top advisors with experience at ASML and NXP, as well as David DiVincenzo, a distinguished scientist in the field of quantum information.
End goal
The Dutch quantum technology startup is on a mission to be the first company to tackle the testing bottleneck for quantum chips, similar to the way ASML has tackled the reduction in feature size of classical chip components with their development of EUV lithography processes.
“Our high-throughput quantum chip testing systems will support much shorter development cycles for our customers. This enables them to build functional quantum chips with many more high-quality qubits, which can eventually be good enough to be used in the first useful quantum computers. Orange QS will be an OEM that is able to steer its supply chain and accelerate development of key innovations required for high throughput testing systems,” states Alberts.
This OEM position is currently only held by quantum computer builders, such as IQM, Rigetti Computing and Oxford Quantum Circuits or research groups at innovative corporates, such as IBM Quantum, Google Quantum AI and Intel,”
The Investors
Backed by Quantum Delta NL, QDNL Participations will invest €15M into early-stage Dutch quantum computing startups in the coming years.
The QDNL Participations fund provides the bridge between the grant-giving phase of research and the ‘patient capital’ phase of venture investment.
“By providing rapid and accurate testing of quantum devices, Orange QS is filling a crucial need for the emerging quantum computing industry. This technology will catalyze many more innovations in the Dutch quantum ecosystem and strengthen the country’s position as a leader in this field. I look forward to propelling this transformative quantum platform forward together,” says Ton van ‘t Noordende, Managing Director of QDNL Participations.
Cottonwood Technology Fund is a venture capital firm that invests in early-stage technology companies. The firm has a focus on deep-tech startups in the areas of cleantech, medtech, robotics, photonics, nanotechnology, advanced materials and sensor technology.
“We think Orange QS has chosen a very unique position in the quantum supply chain, and we are very excited that this team is able to be the global winner in quantum diagnostics and testing”, says Alain le Loux, General Partner at Cottonwood Technology Fund.
Read the orginal article: https://siliconcanals.com/news/startups/orange-quantum-systems-bags-1-5m/
